Finley M. I. The Ancient Economy

A quarter of a century after it was published, The Ancient Economy is still squarely at the center of debate. Finley showed decisively that philological/empiricist history could not make sense of ancient economic phenomena. A great deal of very good work is still being done in his style, but on the whole it has more to say about the debates of the 1890s lhan about the new orthodoxy. The Ancient Economy stands midway between deterministic, economistic approaches and postmodern literary explorations. Both undersocialization and oversocialization critics must engage seriously with Pulley's work if they are to make any headway.

Weber believed that true sociological understanding called for two kinds of research, one oriented toward formulating abstract ideal types and the other toward contrasting these with the evidence for people's actual behavior and beliefs. Ideally, the same person would conduct both activities at different moments. The result would be a constant tacking back and forth between generalized structures and the experiences of individual actors, which is precisely what Finley does in The Ancient Economy. Inevitably, newer studies mean that we need to modify many of Finley's conclusions, such as those on the scale of Athenian banking, the location of the market in the Roman economy, and economic growth in antiquity, but The Ancient Economy's humane vision of the Greek and Roman past will remain at the center of our arguments for the foreseeable future. Any informed discussion of these phenomena has to start with Finley's model of the centrality of the egalitarian citizen group and its interrelations with large-scale chattel slavery. For many of us who came to ancient history in the 1970s and 1980s, reading The Ancient Economy was a formative experience. This new edition extends the same opportunity to a new generation of students.